I have a question, or more precisely I am trying to get a general consensus about a problem....
I am a flash developer and I have been tasked with developing a mobile application to run on primarily WM devices, with possible migration to other platforms. It is to be a Flash based application, in the means of an "offline", which will be downloaded.
Recently, Adobe saw fit to discontinue support for Flash Lite 3.1 distributable player. This is more than likely due to the "open screen project", and implementation of Flash Player 10.1 which is to be platform independent. The problem with this is that they left nothing for the interim.
My question is this; Of the ppl here that are knowledgeable about Flash dev., would you continue to develop in Flash lite, or would you go ahead and go A/S3 Flash 10, and wait for the jump to 10.1? I am thinking that the latter is the better choice. However if I do that, I have no guarantee of keeeping it as a standalone app.
I know that this Flash Player is out. Is it ready for smartphones? Can I or will I be able to download it and install it (like as a cab in WM)? Will it work only on new processors like the snapdragon? I would love to get my hands on the mobile version now and tweak it. I know that this site has great programmers who are in the know!
Definitely not yet for smart phones. Tried it on my umpc, and while it sped up, still slow. And no wm version that I am aware of, but you could try flash lite for wm
flash lite (at least the one I found and installed ) doesn't work on hardly any flash websites as most are flash 10 supported only. I wish adobe would hurry and release flash 10 mobile but, instead they're taking their sweet time. By the time they release it all websites will be flash 11 only and we will be back in this situation such desgraciados!!!
Adobe is testing Flash 10 for Android, but it's still pretty inefficient AFAIK. As far as current mobile flash versions go, regardless of platform, they're pretty much unusable for most things. If you can get flash working on YouTube, you often can't get it working on sites like HTC, or vice versa. Adobe announced a while back that they were attempting to get Flash 10 on all mobile operating systems, but at the rate Adobe develops Flash, it'll probably be awhile until every platform gets it.
[rant] Considering Linux still doesn't have full, stable Flash support after years of "development", and considering the "Open Screen Project" has been around since early 2008 while yielding no usable releases, I'm not going to hold my breath for this project. I'm honestly hoping flash will just die one day, and be replaced with open standards like HTML5. Flash was okay, in the 1990s, but just like Realplayer and AOL, it needs to be replaced with more suitable successors[/rant]
Hi,
I want to develop an app for both Android and iOS and was considering using a cross-platform toolkit. Currently I'm tending towards Appcelerator Titanium as it uses native widgets.
However, since I only really want to target 2 platforms, is it worth doing that? Or should I get myself a cheap Mac Mini (or run OSX under a VM or something) and just develop it natively for both?
Opinions of people who have developed for both platforms would be very helpful.
Regards,
Asfand Qazi
iphone / iOS now has "Alien" which can be used to run android dalvik code directly on the device, I suppose it depends what you are developing?
If your app uses ndk I don't think alien will help because the two devices are not the same inside, but pure Dalvik apps would run through alien and this would halve your dev time worrying about cross-platform issues.
I would have said flash or AIR but I have heard aple has spat the dummy again over AIR and flash apps on it's store so I'd skip that.
Also worth thinking about is something like web apps because both android and iOS support apps ased on webpages. remember it does not have to be the next microsoft office to make bucks.
Just some ideas to get the ball rolling
I'm primarily going for a native look and feel for each platform, so although those options are interesting, I don't think they would suit me. Interesting anyway though, maybe I'll use one of those for a future project.
Here's a link to the project:
http://code.google.com/p/zgrom/
A cut&paste from the page:
ZGrom is a gaming oriented distribution for Sharp Zaurus PDA devices. It's a console based distribution built around the Gmenu2X SDL GUI. ZGrom has a wide selection of quality emulators, game engines and apps. Currently, ZGrom only supports the following Zaurus models:
•C-1000 - Akita
•C-3000 - Spitz
•C-3100 - Borzoi
•C-3200 - Terrier
ZGrom comes with GINGE. In a nutshell, GINGE enables ZGrom users to run unmodified GP2X binaries. Some of the emulators and game engines that come with ZGrom are plain, unmodified GP2X binaries that execute on Zaurus devices via the GINGE static loader.
A link to the gmenu2x page:
http://mtorromeo.github.com/gmenu2x/
A cut&paste from the page:
GMenu2X is a frontend application targeted at embedded devices, originally developed for the GP2X and successively ported to other devices.
GMenu2X provides an easy to use interface with quick access to the games and applications of the device trough links similar to those found on PC's desktops.
Its interface is fully customizable with skins.
Other features include: built-in selector for emulators, manuals and readmes integration, built-in overclocker, gamma and volume configuration, ram timings tweaker.
I started working with these but like with other projects... i'm short on time these days. The last of my efforts had a working kernel for these, only a keymap was needed to give to the zgrom developer to build a rootfs, and for someone to text and debug.
IMO the better way would be focusing on developing Android distro, because probably most people are still waiting for working Android on our beloving UNI! Anyway, your efforts are great and mainly because of you UNI developing is still alive!!! Good luck!!
l2tp said:
IMO the better way would be focusing on developing Android distro, because probably most people are still waiting for working Android on our beloving UNI! Anyway, your efforts are great and mainly because of you UNI developing is still alive!!! Good luck!!
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Click to collapse
Lol, I know, I’m taking a break waiting for another project to finish up:
http://forum.xda-developers.com/showthread.php?t=1948803
I’m working on shrinking android now; deleting unneeded library’s and functions to lower memory/processor requirements and running processes. This OS is better suited for people who don’t use their universal as a phone and only have 64mb of ram. I don’t have time to work on this either, the question “Who wants to port ZGrom?” wasn’t rhetorical; I really want someone to pick up where I left off porting it. And android for universals is mostly done all hardware except the cams work. Power saving, gprs, sound on both ends of the call all work… I just need to trim and speed it up….and learn some arm assembly to add in iwmmxt optimizations.
I understand that 64 MB of RAM is too little to run any recent Android version (and by recent I mean higher than 2.2), so it'd be good if there was some alternative OS to bring life to old Universals with the standard RAM - even if that new 'life' doesn't including phone abilities. I don't think the PXA 27x CPUs aren't really that optimized to run Android either (Android can be slow on ARMv6, let alone ARMv5). I'm not telling you to give up on the Android thing; just trying to make people realize notime can't focus forever on something that can't be further optimized... but if it can, then just go ahead
In that sense, I support any development efforts towards something that's not Android.
Also, the work done in porting recent Linux kernel versions can be used not only in Android but in any other Linux-powered OS porting. I may have a go at it... once I format my computer with a bigger ext4 partition (currently out of space to install any kind of cross-compiling tools or SDK) - and this can get delayed for several months.
I was playing around with my Universal (with a dead battery), running old Linux distros on it (with things like Qtopia and Opie), when I started thinking if there wasn't a more recent thing to run other than Android. Then I remembered I had promised to try to port this thing once I got my computer formatted...
Actually I have already formatted my computer and now I have a mostly free >250 GB ext4 partition. I'll only be able to start working on this in the beginning of July, however.
This seems like the perfect use for a Uni that doesn't survive when it isn't charging.
First off, I wanted to say I posted a few threads about this thing here asking questions about stuff I needed to get it working in the way I'd like and I'd want to thank you because I have made a lot of progress in getting it to be what I'd like it to be. I also don't know if this is the best forum to post this report because it's neither a question nor necessarily a tutorial but rather a summary and description of work already done so far, and especially because this device, while it sure runs Android (very well!) does not fit into any of the categories on this site neatly.
The story so far
This post concerns my experience working with the ITX-3588J, a board released just a few months ago by the Chinese manufacturer Firefly (or T-Chip Intelligent Technology Co. Ltd, based in Zhongshan) that is in the coveted mini-ITX form factor which means it can actually fit into a small-size desktop computer case and indeed has enough compute power to theoretically - and perhaps not so theoretically! - function as an honest desktop system with an ARM processor: namely the - also very new - Rockchip RK3588 system-on-a-chip.
About two months ago, I was looking into acquiring a new kind of computer to replace my somewhat longer on the tooth x86 machine that would be compact, low-power, and easy to transport while also being a fully capable desktop. And I certainly didn't want Apple. I had seen some very small form x86 desktops before, but I also knew there were many boards - like Raspberry Pi - that featured the ARM processor. Not content with the Pi, which is still very weak for this application at least when compared against modern software, I wanted to see if there was something else by now in a similar vein, and when I saw this board I thought it was an amazing option, esp. given I have not yet found a peer. Many ARM single-board devices exist but this is the only one I've found so far that looks to be in a proper desktop form factor and sporting a processor powerful enough to work at that level.
So I got the board, a case, and - noting it had SATA ports - a cheap 250 GB SSD, and put it all together ... and fired it up! And to my surprise, it booted up Android! Which was a real shocker because I generally thought this'd be like another PC board, not having had much experience with this ecosystem beyond phones, so that it would just give the usual "OS not found" stuff. Nope - pre-loaded on the board. Very minimal, very bare-bones though, not even the Google Play and similar essentials required for a usable Android experience. Yet with the little bit I had, I couldn't help but notice it was extremely fluid, responsive, and snappy, moreso than my aging 2018 era x86 box. Moreover, it was very, very interesting (and exciting!) to see Android booted onto a full-size monitor screen like Linux or Microsoft Windows - and actually and surprisingly, to see that it didn't look and feel all that bad!
However, of course, I wanted more. First, I wanted a fully-featured installation of Android. Second, I wanted to run Linux on it - especially given that, a short while later, I found that the board manufacturers were offering a stock Ubuntu 20.04 to be installable to it. Although, in the early stages, I didn't know how to do this at all, and then soon after learned how to reflash the embedded MMC chip to change the OS. And I did so, trying the Ubuntu and finding it also very performant, but not liking either that it was not quite the newest version but also more that it was mutually exclusive with Android - so far.
And that would begin a long - and at many times frustrating, especially given how much information out there is not at all tuned to a device like this being pressed into this application - learning journey toward exploring topics as diverse as how ARM processors and SoCs work under the hood, U-Boot, kernel features, the Firefly-Rockchip developer kit - and having to essentially single-handedly discover many of that kit's ins and outs given there was pretty much no documentation - and more, ultimately leading to where I've got it to now.
What it can do at this point
And that is, right now, I have it sitting here, loaded up with the stock Android 12 and Ubuntu 20.04 - with the former on the eMMC and the latter on the SSD hard drive. On the Android side, Google Play is now loaded and functional, though Google Chrome is not (it crashes with a "Telephony is null" exception for some reason, which seems to suggest for some reason it's trying to act like it's on a phone but isn't). Zoom - an app that I really, really wanted to have (and why I wanted to keep Android around on it) - works and works smoother and cleaner than my 2018 x86 Linux clunker. On the Ubuntu side, though, things are not yet coming - mostly because of seeming inability to use U-Boot to boot from the SSD. I managed to install GRUB, and given that Firefly's generous board SDK provides the full U-Boot source code was able to recompile it with the necessary "bootefi" command enabled which is not present in stock, but nonetheless alas this U-Boot seems to have its SATA support bugged or incomplete, because it would crash immediately upon trying to initialize that subsystem.
Where I'd like to go with it
Obviously, full dual boot of Android and Ubuntu, so getting U-Boot to boot the GRUB resident on the hard drive, is the biggest issue so far, and that means investigating whatever is the problem (or not?) in its SATA subsystem. Getting Google Chrome working on Android is another important step. Moreover - though it would cost extra money that I do not have right now - there's the very interesting possibility, owing to the fact that it has a built in M.2 slot on the board, and alluded to in the title - that the device could be made to act as a cell phone. And finally, the possibility of upgrading to a newer version of Ubuntu (ideally 22.04) - however from what I know so far, it looks like this will have to wait because the stock Linux kernels do not currently support the RK3588 fully - though I'd suggest the Linux kernel developers really should take a look at the SDK that came with this thing because it has lots of code in it including for the kernel, all under GPL.
Final note
One of the most interesting things I've learned from this project, and mentioned earlier, is just how well Android seems to work as a desktop OS. While there have apparently been some attempts to port it to x86, this is perhaps one of the first devices that is desktop-workable and which runs it natively. And one of the things I find that's nice about it is that ironically, because all the apps are designed for small screens, when they are run on a very big screen (and this monitor is not "very big" even by today's monitor standards, being a used and earlier LCD type), they are extremely easy on the eyes and have minimal UI clutter when compared to a typical desktop app on most Linux WMs and on MS Windows.
If you want to know more about the details, or anything else, feel free to ask any questions you might have!
UPDATE:
I believe I may have found an easier way to dual-boot Linux with Android, and that consists of configuring a custom ROM that will put both kernels, and GRUB, on the board's eMMC, while the rootfs for both OSes is placed on the hard disk. Will be seeing how it works.
UPDATE:
I have almost completed the custom ROM! I have now both Android and at least the base system for Ubuntu 20.04 (Kernel 5.10.66) bootable with Android now storing user data on the hard drive; though I'm still running into some hardware initialization issues in the latter that are keeping me from actually installing the desktop system. With regard to the Ubuntu system, there is some interesting issue in that for some reason the provided SDK kernel, which I had to rebuild, seems to build more Android-like because it wants to look in "/vendor" for some things related seemingly to the networking facilities, and it is possible this is preventing me from bringing up wifi, which I need in order to download the rest of the system.
But lots of progress overall - it seems that a full-fledged ARM desktop running simultaneously Android and Ubuntu is within reach to be wrung from this board!
Ignore my request for an update in another post. Seems you like you moving along. I don't need dual boot, just a working Android 12 with GPlay and Chrome. Did you get Chrome to work?
mebalzer said:
Ignore my request for an update in another post. Seems you like you moving along. I don't need dual boot, just a working Android 12 with GPlay and Chrome. Did you get Chrome to work?
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Click to collapse
Thanks. Yeah, I want to say that I have pretty successfully gotten Android 12 working on it for sure, but Ubuntu is proving much more difficult due to graphics support issues, and I'm not sure if it will be possible until RK3588 is supported in the mainline Linux kernel tree which is still something under development. And yes! I got Chrome to work Everything works, actually - it's great as an Android system, though obviously Android is kinda funny to use as a desktop OS. I am wondering if I can't get a "pseudo" Linux using something like Linux Deploy in lieu of running it natively, at least until the kernel development catches up with this new processor.
(FWIW, I'm posting this post from that machine while it is running A12. )
Good to see someone else is interested in it, though. What are you planning on using yours for?
Insofar as getting Android 12 to work w/GApps - it depends on if you want to do it purely on the eMMC or you want to also put user data on an attached hard drive like I did. In either case, the best option, I feel, is to create a custom ROM - I could provide custom ROMs for it for download, but don't know because of Google's licensing conditions around the GApps and have heard of people getting in trouble with Google for distributing custom ROMs for phones that have GApps in them. You basically need to unpack the stock Android image, unpack the "super.img", then load the apps from a package like NikGApps into the "product" partition (NOT "oem" - that was a big mistake), then repack everything and flash to the eMMC again. You will need the board SDK from Firefly for all this as it has the custom ROM-packing and flashing tools.
Alternatively, it is possible to manually install the NikGApps GApps using the Android console - as it's a fully unlocked system, obtaining root access is trivial: just put it into Developer mode and you will find the root access in the "Developer options..." menu under "System".
Shimmy99 said:
Insofar as getting Android 12 to work w/GApps - it depends on if you want to do it purely on the eMMC or you want to also put user data on an attached hard drive like I did. In either case, the best option, I feel, is to create a custom ROM - I could provide custom ROMs for it for download, but don't know because of Google's licensing conditions around the GApps and have heard of people getting in trouble with Google for distributing custom ROMs for phones that have GApps in them. You basically need to unpack the stock Android image, unpack the "super.img", then load the apps from a package like NikGApps into the "product" partition (NOT "oem" - that was a big mistake), then repack everything and flash to the eMMC again. You will need the board SDK from Firefly for all this as it has the custom ROM-packing and flashing tools.
Alternatively, it is possible to manually install the NikGApps GApps using the Android console - as it's a fully unlocked system, obtaining root access is trivial: just put it into Developer mode and you will find the root access in the "Developer options..." menu under "System".
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Thanks I will keep this in mind. See my reply to you other reply on another post as well.
I would to run gplay as well please send me instruction the nikapps github doesnt say nothing